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Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Malaysian plane disappears and evades search forces

Rachel Locke

Staff Writer

Almost a month ago, the Malaysian Airliner Flight 370 left the radar screens of the air traffic controllers and was never seen again. The last words that was spoken on the flight were “Good Night Malaysian Three Seven Zero.” And from there, the rest is a mystery yet to be discovered.

On March 8, Malaysian Flight 370 departed from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian Capital at 12:41 a.m., and was planning to arrive in Beijing, China around 6:30 a.m. the same day. The flight carried 239 passengers and was going to travel a total distance of 2,700 miles. However, no sooner than an hour into the trip, the air traffic controllers lost sight of the plane between the seas of Malaysia and Vietnam. Normally, a distressed call would be issued from the plane to indicate that there was a problem. Unfortunately, this did not happen. Malaysian military officials claim that radar data suggests the plane might have made a change in course. At this point in the disappearance, anything could have happened.

The next day after the plane disappeared, radar images suggested two large oil slicks in the ocean that might have been linked to the plane. If this was true, then the plane might have had a problem and would crash soon. However, this was found to be unrelated to the missing plane. Another theory that arose days after the plane’s disappearance was that Flight 370 was hijacked. There were two passengers aboard the plane that had stolen passports. These individuals bought their tickets at the same time through the same website. Investigators say that they do not think that these individuals had any effect on the disappearance of the plane. Many countries, including the United States, went on a mission to find the missing plane. They took large boats out into the Indian Ocean and the surrounding seas of Malaysia but did not find anything significant. There was no correlation between the things they did find to Flight 370.

The families of the passengers of Flight 370 are saddened by the inability to find this missing flight. They have not received answers about where their loved ones could be, and as of now, there really is no evidence of where the plane is or what happened to it. This might as well be the worst aviation mystery in history.